1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a store management system for providing store management services by a service provider who offers services using a network via a general public line.
2. Description of the Related Art
A store management system that manages stores including retailers comprises a POS system that executes POS (Point of Sales) operations such as commodity sales information management, and a BO system that executes BO (Back Office) operations such as inventory management, ordering management and employee management.
The POS system that stands for point of sales system collects sales information by items to grasp which item was sold, when it was sold and how many pieces of the item were sold, enabling the settlement, accumulation and analysis of sales of each item.
For example, in the POS system the PLU (Price Look Up) operation to obtain commodity prices reads bar codes attached to the price tags of commodity, using a POS terminal such as a bar code reader, a handy terminal or an electronic cash register, and accesses a commodity database called commodity master for the respective bar code information. The commodity database is a database to store commodity information name and sales price of each item, and it is disposed in the headquarters of a retailer. A store office or a center located at a distant place can be used as the headquarters. If the store office is used as the headquarters, the POS terminal and the commodity database are connected together by a LAN. If a center located at a distant place is used as the headquarters, they are connected together by an exclusive line or via the Internet. The commodity database returns the sales information such as the sales price of commodity that corresponds to the received bar code information.
In the BO system, a BO terminal disposed in a store is a computer to input and output commodity inventory data, stock data and data on the times employees report for work and leave the office, for each store. These data are transferred to the headquarters server disposed in the headquarters that executes inventory management, ordering and employee management operations.
Such POS and BO functions can be provided as store management services by a service provider (ASP: Application Service Provider) who offers various services using a network such as the Internet. More specifically, a server on a network that a service provider manages is equipped with merchant database and headquarters server functions, and communicates with POS and BO terminals in a store via its telephone line.
However, it is difficult to provide store management services, such as PLU (Price Look Up) operation executed on a POS terminal for a commodity database that require high-speed response, by network communication using a general public line (telephone line).
If a store uses store management services of a service provider, the store needs to pay the charge to the service provider and the communication charge to a telecommunications company, and there will be a problem of incurring a high communication charge in the case that services such as PLU requiring frequent accesses are used.